"We cleaned up a field."
"We did."
"We were shouted at by a caterer."
"We were." I take the water she hands me. "How do you feel?"
Iris considers it seriously, the way she considers everything.
"Fine," she says. And then, sounding faintly surprised at herself: "Actually fine. Not — notradiant.Not transformed. Just fine. Just... this."
And she glances at me, slightly alarmed, as though she thinks she's given the wrong answer.
But that's it. That's the whole thing. That's the one I promised her in that field, in front of everybody, with my hands shaking.
Anybody can do the wedding.
"Good," I tell her. "That's the bit that lasts."
We go in at three and sleep for four hours in our clothes, and wake up starving in the dark, and there is nothing in the house, because a hundred and ten people ate all of it.
So I make an omelette.
Of course I do.
We eat it standing at the counter, out of the pan, with two forks, on our first night as a married couple. And Iris — who has been eating my food for six months and has never once said a word about it — puts her head on my shoulder while she chews.
"Cat."
"Mm."
"Every day?"
"Every day," I say.
And that's Sunday.
EPILOGUE — IRIS
ONE YEAR LATER
The harvest starts on Thursday and the restaurant opens on Saturday, and I have color-coded both.
Cat finds this hilarious. Cat finds most things about me hilarious — which took me an embarrassingly long time to understand was a form of devotion.
Les Oliviers reopens under new management in four days. Mathilde retired at the end of June, handed us the keys, cried without apologizing for it, and then came back the following morning to inform Cat that she was doing the daube wrong.
She comes back most mornings.
Nobody has asked her to stop.
My mother rings on Sundays.
Sometimes.
It started in the spring — short, careful conversations about nothing in particular, both of us walking very slowly around the things we still can't say. She asks about the fields. I ask about her knee. We are unfailingly polite, in the manner of two peoplecarrying something heavy between them who have agreed not to mention it.
It isn't forgiveness. I don't know that it ever will be.
